Aunt wants 20 years for girlfriend that sent texts that lead to boyfriends death

A grieving aunt of teen suicide victim Conrad Roy III is looking for a 20-year prison sentence for Michelle Carter tomorrow on the heels of her conviction in the blockbuster suicide-by-text case — but the girl’s worried dad is pleading for probation.

“I believe she should be kept far away from society,” wrote Kim Bozzi, Roy’s aunt, in a statement she said she plans to read at Carter’s sentencing inside Taunton Trial Court.

“Take away the spotlight that she so desperately craves. Twenty years may seem extreme but it is still twenty more than Conrad will ever have,” Bozzi said in the written statement she gave to the Herald.

But David Carter, Michelle’s father, begged for probation and “continued counselling” in a July letter to Judge Lawrence Moniz.

“She will forever live with what she has done and I know will be a better person because of it,” David Carter wrote in the signed letter, provided to the Herald. “I ask of you to invoke leniency in your decision-making process for my loving child Michelle.”

Moniz, who found Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter in June after a jury-waived trial, will weigh the competing pleas when he hands down a sentence tomorrow at 2 p.m.

The judge found that Carter caused the death of Roy, who killed himself in a Fairhaven Kmart parking lot in 2014 by filling his truck with carbon monoxide.

Carter, 20, of Plainville, who had an almost entirely virtual relationship with Roy, goaded him into killing himself through a series of texts and calls. The Mattapoisett teen left the truck as it filled with deadly fumes, but according to testimony at Carter’s trial, she told him on the phone to “get back in.”

“I’m unsure when she decided to set her sick plan into motion or why, but when she did she did it relentlessly, it was calculated and it was planned down to a T,” Bozzi wrote in the victim-impact statement. “She preyed on his vulnerabilities, he trusted her, which in turn, cost him his life.”

Bozzi, who attended every court appearance, told the Herald other family members are prepared to speak as well. She said Carter’s conviction was a relief and that “what happens next is up to God and a judge.”

Carter has received support of her own. Carla Andrews, who mentored Carter while she was a student at King Philip High School in Wrentham, wrote a letter to Moniz last month asking for leniency.

“I am fearful that time spent in a confined, prison environment would dramatically impair and impede Michelle’s development growth and request that you invoke leniency in your decision-making process,” she wrote in a letter, provided to the Herald.

David Carter, in his letter to Moniz, called tomorrow a “life changing day for my family.”

He added: “I pray to God you will take into consideration that Michelle was a troubled, vulnerable teenager in an extremely difficult situation and made a tragic mistake.”